Toy Theatre is a free browser-based platform with educational games for kindergarten through sixth grade. Founded in 2001 by Joel Gaspard, it now draws over one million users annually. Teachers use it without accounts, downloads, or subscriptions — though a paid tier exists for classroom management features. What Is Toy Theatre and Who Is It For? Toy Theatre is a website with interactive games and tools organized around math, reading, art, music, and logic. It runs in any browser on deskt...

Last week I argued how NASA’s Artemis II mission wasn’t a “science” mission even if its communications and majority media coverage have been getting people worldwide to believe so. Since then, my inbox has been flowing with emails from planetary scientists in support, who variably noted also its broader value in having certain distinctions and nuances when it comes to talking about space exploration and its terms. It’s so good to know that so many of my readers care about this issu...

A few months ago in Oxford, Bernard Sufrin, an emeritus fellow, said he's looking to hire a student to implement LEAP (Logic Engine for Argument by Pointing), a way to teach logic by proving basic logic theorems via pointing and clicking. Rahul Santhanam said why not give it to AI. Bernard said AI can't handle this task. I thought why not give it a try. I gave Claude a single prompt that Bernard helped me formulate: Architecture of a system to support proof by pointing in first order logic using...

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A Go closure holds a live reference to whatever it captures, not a snapshot. Real examples of where this trips people up, and how to keep it boring. A Go closure holds a live reference to whatever it captures, not a snapshot. Real examples of where this trips people up, and how to keep it boring.

For years, the best way to get 10 gigabit networking on laptops was to buy an expensive, large, and hot 10 GbE Thunderbolt adapter. With new RTL8159-based 10G USB 3.2 adapters coming onto the market, the bulky adapters might be a thing of the past. Just look at the size of the thing in comparison to my Thunderbolt adapters: 2.5G and even 5G USB adapters have been out for a while, but sometimes you need more bandwidth. For years, the best way to get 10 gigabit networking on laptops was...

“Memory is not what the heart desires. That is only a mirror.” ― The Lord of the Rings Queenstown is a small town with a population of under 30.000. However, with hundreds of thousands of people visiting this town each year, it's one of the biggest tourist hotspots in New Zealand. There are two main reasons: it's an entry point to the Milford Sound, and there are all sorts of thrilling and relaxing activities you can imagine. I only managed to visit the town for around two days due t...

I like to walk quickly. One of my childhood friends did, too. Whenever I reflect on the pace at which I walk, I think of the times when we tried to walk as fast as possible. My friend was much more athletic than I – with longer legs, too – so they often had the edge in walking speed. I loved trying to be quick anyway. Now, I have the joy of walking bringing back those memories. When I notice something out in the world, I often stop in my tracks, eager to see or hear as much of what I have no...

Welcome to Austin’s Nerdy Things, where we spend years chasing nanoseconds that nobody asked us to chase. Five years ago, I started this blog by building a microsecond-accurate NTP server with a Raspberry Pi and PPS GPS . Then I went simpler – a $12 USB GPS for millisecond-accurate NTP because ease of use matters too. Then I spent months doing thermal management on the CPU to squeeze out another 81% improvement. My beloved Raspberry Pi 3B has been sitting at around +/- 200 nanoseco...

After almost three years of 6.x series kernels, Linux 7.0 is finally here. That means it’s also time for another Asahi progress report! Automate Everything Users of alternate distros and keen-eyed individuals may have noticed some changes to the Asahi Installer. After almost two years, we finally got around to pushing an updated version of the installer to the CDN! Two years is a long time to go between updates, so what took so long? After almost three years of 6.x series kernels, Linux 7.0 i...

Ultra Robotics’ OP1, which mounts a humanoid-ish robot to a larger robot arm, via Jon Schwartz on Twitter . Welcome to the reading list, a list of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at transformer steel manufacturing, textile engineering, bringing power plants online quickly, infrasound, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran This week in Strait of Hormuz...

This past Tuesday I typed C-x C-c in Emacs for the last time after 20 years of daily use. Though nearly half that time was gradually retiring it, switching to modal editing, then to Vim. Emacs is a platform, and I’d grown accustomed to its applications, especially those I built myself. There was no particular hurry, so replacements came slowly. With my newly-acquired superpowers I could knock out the last two pieces in a few days’ work, namely M-x calc with stackcalc and Elfeed w...

📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 200mm f /4 🎞️ Ilford HP5+ pushed to ISO 1600 📍 Out and about in Manchester 📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 200mm f /4 🎞️ Ilford HP5+ pushed to ISO 1600 📍 Out and about in Manchester 📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 200mm f /4 🎞️ Ilford HP5+ pushed to ISO 1600 📍 Out and about in Manchester f

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's last model release was V3.2 (and V3.2 Speciale) last December . They just dropped the first of their hotly anticipated V4 series in the shape of two preview models, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash . Both models are 1 million token context Mixture of Experts. Pro is 1.6T total parameters, 49B active. Flash is 284B total, 13B active. They're using the standard MIT license. I think this makes DeepSeek-V4-Pro the new largest open weights model. It's larger tha...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nicolas Solerieu, whose blog can be found at slrncl.com/blog . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? I’m dad, designer, cyclist, designer, t...

If you spend enough time in US business or finance conversations, one word keeps showing up: equity . Coming from a German-speaking, central European background, I found it surprisingly hard to fully internalize what that word means. More than that, I find it very hard to talk with other Europeans about it. Worst of all it’s almost impossible to explain it in German without either sounding overly technical or losing an important part of the meaning. This post is in English, but it is ...

Introducing the compute unit- a modular and customizable desktop enclosure for small computers like the Latte Panda IOTA and the Raspberry Pi 5. I increasingly look to smaller and lighter compute platforms as the core of my lab infrastructure gets more refined. Sure, it's great to have a small datacenter at your disposal, but dealing with power, heat, and noise are really pretty terrible if they're in your living space. I always look at fanless or water cooled options since they tend to be far...

If you've done much with modern cellphones, you've probably noticed just how odd the architecture can be around audio. Specifically, I mean call audio: modern smartphones have made call audio less of a special case (mostly by just becoming more complicated in general), but in older phones you would often find arrangements where the cellular modem 1 had direct analog audio to the microphone and speaker, perhaps via some switching to share amplifiers. That design meant that the cellular modem fu...

This is my beautiful old Commodore 64 “Aldi” case and keyboard I picked up in September 2023 from a seller in Germany: Note the somewhat unusual combination of beige keyboard paired with the darker breadbin case. When most people think “Commodore 64”, they likely picture a dark brown keyboard similar to later VIC-20 machines. This unit was sold in Aldi in Germany, and unlike the later 64G, had a double-shot keyboard with PETSCII characters printed on the front. My unit would ha...

Email, RSS, the open hyperlink, and the early web were commons: shared infrastructure anyone could build on. Social platforms converted that commons into walled gardens, moving the audience inside and charging rent for access to it. In doing this, big tech companies were following a centuries-old playbook. The idea that an individual can own a piece of the earth’s surface is younger than most people realize, specific to certain legal traditions, and was imposed on much of the world by force....

Every experience we have changes our brain, the way a ceramicist reshapes a slab of clay. Every corner we turn, every conversation we have, every shudder we feel causes cascading effects: Chemicals are released, electricity surges, the connections between brain cells tighten, and our mental models update. The brain is “incredibly plastic, and it stays that way throughout the lifespan of a human,”… Source Every experience we have changes our brain, the way a ceramicist reshapes a slab of...

I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall 1 . However, it seems pretty obvious that using AI to perform a task means you don’t learn as much about performing that task . Some software engineers think this is a decisive argument against the use of AI. Their argument goes something like this: Using AI means you don’t learn as much from your work AI-users thus become less effective engineers over time, as their technical skills atrophy...

… everything. I need to know less, but I know more.  Trying to cultivate a life which allows me to know less while still participating in society requires me to know more and do more than simply laying back and passively allowing the unending flood of information to drown me.  Please note that we are all being drowned. What is it that is drowning us?  Information and misinformation. Part of the drowning is the effort required to try to distinguish between the two. You’re try...